Velvet nails: crescent moon from Ruffian & Mac

Navigate your screen to anything from Instagram to Tumblr and you’ll see a common theme emerge: pictures of perfectly manicured nails. Few, though, are pictures of the traditional manicure. What you’ll find instead are pictures of something more akin to fake nails – textured and printed nail-art finishes layered upon a natural finger nail. Some have the cute factor (Alexa Chung wore eye ball nail art to Jason Wu’s NYFW showing) while others have a subtler factor.

I place Mac’s velvet flocked crescent moon nail tips in the latter category.

A bespoke creation for Ruffian’s fall 2012 runway, the velvet flocked nail tips were created in three different colours: in the signature Ruffian red (thus matching the Mac’s Ruffian red lipstick), in a navy blue and in a deep jewel-tone purple.

Keri Blair, Senior Artist with Mac Cosmetics, created the custom velvet nail tips for Ruffian’s catwalk. She explained to Fashionising.com that the nail tips were designed to be suited to the Ruffian girls’ lifestyle.

The velvet flocked nail tips were specifically imagined for the girl who lives in the city and goes and visits her family in the countryside of England.

She comes from money, so she’s allowed to be a spectator in her own life.

Specifically though, Blair told us that it was about using finger nails as an accessory, akin to picking the right handbag. “Makeup doesn’t end at the jaw line – it’s about perfecting yourself all the way to the end of your finger tips.”